by Naomi Joy
I’m embarrassed to see her.
‘Hi,’ she calls quietly, as though I’m so ill I’m sensitive to sound. ‘I brought you these, where shall I…’
She looks round and quickly gathers from the single vase already occupied with Mum’s flowers that she’s misjudged her gift. ‘Sorry, I should have thought, should have brought a vase from home or something.’
‘Don’t be silly, they’re beautiful, thank you.’
She pulls up a seat next to me.
‘How have you been?’
I look away from her, not sure how to proceed. I feel out of it today, dreamy, distant.
‘Emelia?’ Mishti asks and I’m aware by the way she says it that she’s repeating herself. I watch her raise her hand, two fingers and a thumb pointing up, the others bent.
‘Anyone home?’ she asks, waving her hand back and forth in front of my eyeline.
‘Sorry,’ I say, gathering myself. ‘I think I’m on some strong medication.’
Mishti’s face twitches with sorrow. ‘What’s the latest?’
‘My blood is contaminated with heavy metals,’ I reply. ‘And I have high tumour levels.’
‘Tumours?’ Mishti repeats, audible worry in her voice. The far-off voices of the busy ward act as background music, filling the gap in our conversation as Mishti tries to work out what else to say. ‘What are they going to do about it?’
‘Tests. Then more tests. Then even more tests.’ I roll my eyes.
Her face stretches in sympathy and I appreciate her concern, I really do. She grabs my arm, the feel of her skin on mine electrifying and I turn back, holding her in my gaze. She’s looking at me funny, her eyes watery, lips a-quiver and I suppose I should get used to this, the You’re brave but I’m so glad this isn’t happening to me look. I’ve only seen it once and I’m already tired of it.
‘How are things with Anthony?’ she asks, changing the subject.
I don’t know what to say in response. She was so rational and level headed in the restaurant when we last spoke – pointing out that most people don’t follow their husbands from pillar to post just because they’ve been overly attentive. But she doesn’t understand.
‘Much better,’ I say, though the moisture that pools in my eyes betrays me. ‘How’s Eva? I miss her.’
‘Still a beautiful handful,’ she replies, turning the conversation to how things are at home. Skating over the topic of Damien, we talk for a while about mundane events and I’m surprised by how much I’ve missed these chats. When something serious happens the weather doesn’t matter any more, but it should – the sun we’re having at the moment really is remarkable.
On her way out Mishti turns. ‘If there’s anything I can do, no matter how big or small, you must let me know.’
‘Thank you,’ I reply.
Her kind eyes smile as she makes to leave.
I rise from my bed as Mishti disappears and watch through a gap in the blind as she pulls on her coat and goes to the reception desk to check out. My heart sinks when I see who’s on duty. Not her, I think.
‘How’s she doing?’ the receptionist asks Mishti softly, but I can’t hear their conversation properly from my room so I twitch open the door and step outside, clutching my stomach, disappearing round the corner so I’m hidden from view. ‘She was in quite a bad way when she arrived, we’re so glad she’s making progress.’
I channel the receptionist, my mind doing overtime, trying to reach for some as yet untapped psychic power to encourage her to stop this conversation.
‘What actually happened that morning?’ Mishti asks, leaning closer.
‘It’s funny, Emelia had a psychotic episode the day before she was admitted here. I think she’d been following her husband, Anthony, and he’d led her to the hospital.’
Mishti murmurs with recognition.
I’d told her this story through a different lens.
‘When she turned up here, she was convinced she was filming some sort of documentary series…’ The receptionist pauses. ‘I think, on some level, she’d known she was coming here and was preparing herself for that with a kind of cover story that she could live with.’
I can’t listen to any more and pad back into my room, pulling the covers tight to my neck. A jumbo roar growls in the distance and I watch as a mighty double-decker plane jets past my window, its vapour trail stopping and starting, flying through turbulent air. I imagine passengers gripping armrests as the craft throws them about in their seats, slight panic on faces, nervous laughter, silent prayers.
My phone springs to life on the bedside table, vibrating so incessantly on the wooden surface it resembles an insect scuttling round in noisy, nonsensical circles. I wrap my hand round it, muting the sound, and take a quick glance at the text message on the display. My blood runs cold.
You still have time, Emelia. Run.
Blog Entry
13th December, 9 a.m.
The doctor’s lips are straight as she trots through the results of my MRI scan, her placid expression unmoved. Apparently, they’ve identified ‘several’ growths that warrant further investigation. I hit her with a barrage of questions. Am I going to die? Can’t you just take whatever these are out of me right now? Why not? Why wait? She’s trained for this. She’s seen a thousand other people just like me. She knows what to do, how to handle it; her razor-sharp fringe is as no-nonsense as she is. I work myself up to my most important question, the strings at the back of my gown twisting together as I shift position in my bed.
‘Am I going to die?’
She looks down at her notes, then clasps her hands together and meets my worried eyes. ‘I can’t give you any kind of prognosis yet, not until we get the results from the biopsies, but if these growths we’ve found are cancerous then we may need to perform surgery. I don’t want us getting ahead of ourselves, they could well be nothing and, anyway, surgery would depend on a whole host of factors.’
My body clams up, cold sweats coat my hands and feet as the reality of that sentence sinks in.
‘How likely is it that it’s cancer?’ My voice is tiny, terrified, this new state of affairs hitting me from nowhere. Cancer? How is that even possible?
‘Again, I can’t give you an answer on that – not until we have the results.’
She shoots me a smile but I think I can sense pity behind it. This is bad, and she knows it, she’s just not telling me.
‘Can I ask one last thing?’ I say to the doctor, hurried, as she’s wrapping up to leave.
‘Sure.’
‘Are you able to keep this information between us? I just need some time to figure out what to say to my parents and my husband. I’d rather process this alone for a while. Is that OK?’
‘Of course, however you want to deal with this is your choice, but I should say – your husband has been a great support to you while you’ve been in here.’
‘He has?’
A horrible cloud forms apace in my mind, an ominous shade of doubt, my life re-told in a different light – Anthony, my doting husband, killing me with kindness and nothing else.
She takes a seat on the side of my bed, the mattress sinking with her weight. ‘You’re going through a difficult time. I see lots of patients who take out their uncertainties on those closest to them. Perhaps consider your relationship in a different light, given where we are today. Reflect on the possibility that your mind has been playing tricks on you and that Anthony has only ever been trying to help.’
Part of me wants to believe her, wants to sink into her version of events but at the moment I’m questioning everything, I spot the unmistakeable outline of my husband’s shoulders, hovering. I wonder how long he’s been standing there, waiting for the doctor to say the words he planted in her mouth with a few carefully scripted visits.
My wife, doctor, she’s scared of me. I don’t know what to do.
Don’t worry, Mr Lyon, I’ll talk to her, make her see sense.
*
I wake to an
unsettling sight: Anthony standing tall in the doorway, his full-moon glasses covering his eyes, skin waxy and sun starved, his knuckles red, moustache dry and wiry. He stares at me, blinks, but, rather than come in, hangs back in the doorway, watching. He clears his throat.
‘You’re so peaceful when you’re asleep,’ he says, his words a scaly slither of half-truths.
I sense a burning heat in the palm of my hands and realise I’m gripping the railings of the bed tight. I release them as he strides in.
‘I heard the news,’ he says, his voice reverberating round the four walls of my cell.
I pull away. ‘How?’
‘It doesn’t matter how, what matters is what we do next.’
‘Does it?’ I look for someone in the artificial light behind the windows of my room, scanning it for a uniform or a voice to let me know someone’s out there and I’m not alone with him.
‘That’s why I want to give us something to look forward to. Here,’ he says, placing something on the bedside table. ‘Two tickets to Mykonos for New Year. I don’t want you to think you’re going to be holed up in here. You’re going to be on the beach, darling.’
I feel queasy as I stare at the tickets, his name printed bold across the front, shouts of another looming crisis slithering in from outside my room – there have been emergencies all day today.
‘I won’t be out,’ I remind him.
‘I won’t accept that for an answer, Emelia. I want you to put your mind to it. Get better for this trip, I know you can do it.’
I try to navigate the meaning behind his words but fail. I turn to him, slowly, the lymph nodes on my neck aching and sore as I force them to move. I learnt this week that they’re an incredible network of nodules that run the length and breadth of your body, eliminating infection and disease, like the blood’s ultimate filter. I asked the doctor if it was a good thing that mine were puffed up and sore, clearly working overtime in their bid to clear my body of its ills, and she’d shrugged, lied, said it was merely a sign my body was fighting something.
‘What will we do when we get there?’ I ask.
‘Let’s see,’ he says, his voice suddenly soporific, the rise and fall of his breathing hypnotic, beguiling. ‘I thought we’d fly into Athens first for the Acropolis and the Parthenon, then catch an evening flight to the island. When we get there, we can relax in the outdoor spa at the hotel, ride horses on the beach – there are a lot of beaches – or we could visit the monasteries, explore the town, eat our weight’s worth in souvlaki…’ I find myself hypnotised by the way his hands are moving, imagining the bones crunching together as he squeezes them yellow and I drift off, dreaming of it, imagining an alternative version of events where my husband isn’t trying to kill me and I’m the one in the wrong.
Blog Entry
18th December, 9 a.m.
Today marks five days since the biopsy results and the day I’ll find out what fate has befallen me. I woke up at three o’clock this morning, again at just after four thirty, and for a final time at five past five. I forced myself out of bed at five fifteen, reaching my limit with the vivid nightmare I’d been dozing in and out of in which I was a guest at my own funeral. That I’d risen above myself in a white nightdress, cut at the seams, translucent, caterwauling that I hadn’t listened, that I hadn’t got away fast enough. You’re running out of time. Run, Emelia.
I tried to watch TV, but I was just staring at the screen, my brain a block of nothingness, jolted back into the present by the end credits, with no idea at all what had happened during the past sixty minutes. I tried reading, but I ended up starting the same page ten times in a row as the more I read, the more difficult I found it to focus, or care, about the drama before me. I had a shower, pulled on some clean clothes, brushed my hair and painted my nails. Navy, to match the blue diamonds printed across my hospital gown. After that, I waited, picking at a scab on my elbow until it bled, for someone to tell me the consultant was ready for me. I’d have to go to her office this time, she was too important to come to me.
My phone sat by my side. 100 per cent charged. Waiting, ready.
At eleven thirty, it rung for the first time: Mum and Dad, frantic.
‘Emelia, we just wanted to check in. Is there any news yet?’
‘Not yet,’ I panted, frustrated with them for pretending to care. ‘Like I said, I’ll call you when I know.’
I hung up angrily and returned the phone to its spot. When my parents had found out about my biopsy results, they’d been halfway in Dad’s new hatchback ready to leave for the hospital, but I’d insisted that the consultant had wanted to see me alone. It was a lie, but I couldn’t bear to be with anyone.
At 12.56 p.m., a nurse knocked on my door and my hand flew from the bloody patch on my elbow to the railing on the bed, gripping it tight. This was it.
‘You look nice,’ she said, and, I’m not entirely sure why, but it made me uncomfortably aware of the way I’d dressed up for today, as if it was inappropriate somehow: my hair unusually clean, looped in a plait that followed the twist of my neck, pooled at my shoulder, then snaked down to my collarbone.
‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ she said – clearly ‘nice’ was her go-to adjective – and she squinted into the sun, putting a hand to her forehead, creating a shadowy veranda for her eyes. I hadn’t noticed and I didn’t answer but a thought popped: maybe it was a good omen.
She stared, beady eyes judging my silence, weighing up how to handle my situation.
‘Are you waiting for anyone?’ I could tell she was the controlling type, struggling to understand why I’d want to do this by myself, filing me away in her ‘abnormal’ pigeon hole when I replied that I wanted to do this alone.
‘The consultant will be ready in about ten minutes,’ she said through thin lips, her fake, feathery lashes beating like wings. ‘I’ll take you down to her room now.’
I gripped the rail a little tighter as I moved to get up, the skin on my hands a patchwork of red and yellow, a blood stain smeared from my elbow to the edge of my robe.
Blog Entry
18th December, 4.27 p.m.
I am typing through great, grief-like sobs. My skin is tight and tuna-purple, desperate tears suffocate my eyes and thick tarred stains line my cheeks. It’s bright and blue outside, which I don’t understand, it’s been dark and overcast for weeks now and today, of all days, shouldn’t be sunny. It should be black. Bitumen black. Coal black. Black hole black. As it is, a robin is chirping at the window, basking in the sun’s fire. Oblivious.
I’m not sure how to write what I’m about to write.
I kept it together until I made it back to my room, ignoring the consultant’s offer of a chaperone. I distracted myself first by counting steps: thirteen from the consultant’s room to the lift, fifty down the hall, four to get past the boy in the wheelchair with see-through skin, a further twenty-two to make it out through the double doors. But I lost track on the way up to my room as the sting in my stomach had swollen and the world around me turned into an alternate universe playing on rewind and fast forward all at once. My body stepped forward, but my brain travelled back into that room. ‘You’re not in this alone.’
Yes, I am.
I was jostled out of the way as impatient visitors pushed past the invisible me, now rooted to the spot. I heard the beep of the lift doors, warning me they were about to close. Get in the lift, Emelia. Springing into action, elbows wide, I forced my way on just as the doors had shut on my bones. Ow. Eyes rolled, a newspaper fluttered, somebody furiously crossed their arms. I heard the sigh and cringed for the spectacle I’d made of myself.
The elevator screamed as I travelled up and down without purpose, not ready to go back yet and be alone with my thoughts, different faces bobbing in and out, some ill, some well, playing a bleak version of musical statues around me. I didn’t look at my reflection, instead I stared at my feet and pretended I was someone else: I am not here, this is not me, I am someone else. I am someone well. The sigh
t of a chemotherapy patient and I might have lost it. But I didn’t, I kept it together, offered a neutral greeting to the ward receptionist as I shuffled back to my room, metal door handle against my skin, cool, then silence.
Then it hit me.
My body caved in and I collapsed awkwardly onto my hands and knees, retching and gasping for breath, every part of me overcome. Every inch of me consumed with insatiable, visceral pain. At some point a nurse came in and calmed me down with a hit of sedatives.
*
The robin on the windowsill stares at me as I cry, his head cocked at forty-five degrees, as though he’s trying to work me out. I’m almost embarrassed at how upset I am, actually; so many people going through this manage to be brave, strong, courageous… but I’m like something out of an over the top theatre scene in which the director’s only comment to the actress is, More! We don’t want a dry eye in the house!
But I can’t help it. Because today was D-day: diagnosis day. My worst fears realised. The dawning of the fact that Anthony would, at last, get his wish.
I’ll attempt to paint the picture of the moment my world crumbled.
*
‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid.’
My eyes blur a little. The steady pendulum tick of the clock on the wall beats me into the next second. The doctor’s words hang heavy in the air.
‘It’s cancer.’
I look up at the clock and memorise the time: 3.03 p.m. I’m not sure why, but it feels like something I should remember, as if the next thing I’ll do is run home and pen a newspaper announcement: At 3.03 p.m. on the eighteenth of December, my baby tumour was born. A Sagittarius! Five pounds exactly. Baby doing well. Father over the moon. Mother has a year. Max. It occurs to me the time, all odd numbered and angular, is fittingly prickly for the occasion.
White noise plays between my ears as she speaks but, from somewhere beyond the static, the voices in my head scream at me to tell her: It’s Anthony. He made my body so weak that I contracted cancer. This isn’t an accident or bad luck. This is murder. I swallow the shrieks that are desperate to escape, dying to let rip, right in the doctor’s face because I know she won’t believe me if I say them out loud. Not yet, anyway.